In traditional graphics processing architectures, a central processing unit (CPU) may determine the complexity and topology of a scene to be rendered and generate an instruction stream that is processed further by a vertex shader in a graphics pipeline. The instruction stream may include parameters such as vertex data for high-order surfaces, primitives, etc., wherein the vertex shader may transform the vertex data from an object-based coordinate representation (object space) to an alternatively based coordinate system such as world space or normalized device coordinates (NDC) space. Such an architecture may be limited to a fixed topology for each video frame depicting the scene, wherein fixed topologies may limit quality and/or performance. Moreover, the traditional approach may use a tessellation stage later in the graphics pipeline to generate a surface representation and vertex attributes for each vertex associated with the geometric primitives. Reliance solely on late stage tessellation to generate surface representations may further limit quality and/or performance.